New lab (toys) for the road

Being the Luddites we are, we held out on the digital camera until right before we came to China. That turned out be THE greatest toy for John, even more than his guitars. In fact, we are so in love with it, we are reluctant to upgrade and decided to buy a few "accessories" for it, since taking our Thinkpad on the road is out of the question.

Here's what we bought:

Asus WL-HDD 2.5 ( Wireless AP 80Gb HD = NAS)

Transcend TS-RDM2R (Multi-Card Reader)

Nokia N800(MID - Mobile Internet Device or Tablet PC or UMPC)


With this setup, we can

• Backup photos from the camera onto a hard drive by taking the CF card out of the camera, inserting it in the Transcend card reader, and connecting the card reader to the Asus box via mini-USB
  


• Get on the Internet directly with the N800 when there is a wireless connection (hopefully a free Wi-Fi hotspot) or through the Asus AP when only a wired connection is available.
  


• Look at photos on the hard drive with the Nokia using file sharing over the wireless LAN.
  

This setup is like componentizing (is that word) a laptop. We will have a full run with the new setup in Japan, where we may be found on Skype occasionally.

(Technical details:

• We have had "The 800" for 10 days now. Very good engineering. We bought a jacket for it. It runs Linux with the Opera browser.We had a fun time installing xterm/shell and trying to remember vi. ;-)

The 800 with its jacket.

• It look me several days to find a device like the Asus. It is a wireless router as well as backup hard drive. I am so glad that they make such a device!


• We had hoped to plug the camera directly into the Asus, but we had to buy the Transcend. It is a bit of an overkill.


• Everything is working as planned, except I cannot get to CIFS to work 100% on the Nokia. Talk about ironic. The workaround is to use FTP to look at the photos.